"Then you can take me?"
I dug my toes into the sand beside hers, but did not answer.
"If my big bruvver John was here he'd take me over, quick," she continued, with a quivering lip.
John Lane was six, like me, and no bigger. The allusion to him as her big brother, who would take her over quick, and the quivering lip, were too much.
I scrambled to my feet. "Come," I said, with masculine recklessness, starting for the dam, and she followed joyously.
We were about half way over when something happened—I never knew what—but I plumped into deep water like a stone thrown from the shore. I took a great mouthful and came up spluttering, choking, frantic. The slippery wall gave no grip for my hands, and in a moment I must have gone down again, but Jean's head came out over the ledge and her little arms were reached down to mine. I grasped them and hung on—hung in water to my neck, while Jean and I both shouted lustily.
Help came quickly in the person of my father, who had seen the accident from one of the upper windows of the mill, and had come rushing out at a pace which had quite upset the operatives on his route. I was dragged up on the dam in a moment, and I can remember Jean standing beside my father, crying a little, and saying, "Please don' scold him, Mr. Hall. I made him do it."
I expected my father to scold her, but he took her up in his arms and held her to his breast.
"You're a brave little girl, Jean; you're a wonderful little girl," I heard him say, and he kissed her on the face, which he hardly ever did to me. Then homeward he led me, wet and miserable, and speculating silently on what it may mean to be thrashed within an inch of one's life.
But it proved to be a day of surprises. I was not thrashed within an inch of my life, nor at all; I was undressed, and rubbed with a warm towel, and put in bed, and given a large tumblerful of hot choke-cherry wine, because it was still early in the season and the water was cold. And my little sister Marjorie came and looked at me with large, dark, comprehending eyes, and said, "I know why you didn't get thrashed?"